Poets and the Spanish Guitar: A Love Story
And yet, it was a Spanish poet, Vicente Espinel, who gave this instrument a fifth string at the end of the 16th century and brought it fame with his compositions. It was not until the beginning of the 18th century that the sixth string was added, completing the classical guitar that everyone knows and whose use has spread throughout the world, becoming a key instrument, both on the grand stages and in the purest expressions of popular art. "The crying of the guitar begins / The glasses of the dawn break." Thus begins the poem "The Guitar" by Federico García Lorca. Andalusia, the gypsy world and flamenco, of which the guitar is an inseparable part, are the inspiration for his works Poema del Cante Jondo and Romancero Gitano. But he has not been the only poet to find inspiration in guitar music: Gerardo Diego wrote "the guitar is a well with wind instead of water", while Antonio Machado sang to the inn guitar that "today you sound a jota and tomorrow a petenera". The greats of Latin American poetry have also fallen for the charms of the Spanish guitar. "A woman in heat who speaks in her song and dies in her silence," writes Mario Benedetti. "And so the entire night was transformed into a starry guitar box," adds Pablo Neruda. And Nicolás Guillén adds: "A voice of deep, desperate wood."
